


Hurt by the Future

by CarGarZar



Category: Vindictus
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Dark Fantasy, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-15 21:32:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8073427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarGarZar/pseuds/CarGarZar
Summary: Kai is bedridden in one world and kicking up dirt in another. His goal? To find a way out and somehow get back to his home world in Colhen, while avoiding unexpected threats to his life. He unknowingly becomes the target of a sailor named Jim, who fights his way up the Eastern Coast to get to the mercenary.





	1. Chapter 1

            A sailor named Jim Phillip snapped awake on the beach when a cold ocean wave seized him. An involuntary _ah!_ fired from his mouth as he scrambled towards the drier part of the shore. His body was covered in wet sand and seconds later he noticed how buck naked he was when the ocean wind breezed under his Johnson. Jim looked around frantically for two things: one, his clothes and two, other people.

            The sailor was not out here to catch fish. If that were his purpose for coming out here yesterday, he would’ve taken his boat and gone further out to sea, but instead, he had gotten lucky and caught a different kind of fish, the kind men looked for in the bars or on the streets… a “pussy”. They fucked on a ragged, purple towel somewhere far but not too far from the ocean and during their passionate exchange, the ocean waves had never reached their bare ankles due to the low tide. Jim had slept in the same spot, but at some point in his dreamless sleep, the whore had reclaimed her blanket and went back to wherever she came from. The high tide had come back to claim its territory when Jim awoke bitterly. The whore he was with had taken her clothes but tossed his clothes on a latter back beach chair nearby.

            After Jim clothed himself, he walked back into town. A wooden sign he had passed with indifference read “THE HARBOR” in boring, white print. He remembered the first time he came here when he was four years old and both his parents were alive then. The sign had once been propped on top of a long pole of wood, but many years had passed and many unkind things had happened to it, so it lay in the sand like washed up driftwood. The sailor went to his shack to change into clothes he hadn’t already fucked in, then he went to the pub.

Jim heaved the door open and walked in wondering why the door was always so heavy and then he answered his own question: _because it was made for me._ The answer was simple enough. Simple was the way Jim liked to live his life and he got by, doing three simple things: drink, fuck, and sleep. The door wasn’t made for him and he knew, but he always imagined it was like his personal Excalibur. Instead, the door belonged to the Fish Stain, one of the first bars to have opened up in The Harbor since 1859 and many more pubs had spawned likewise, but nothing had ever beaten the original. Jim liked this bar because the owner was a senile frog-catcher who didn’t care enough to kick out Jim’s aggressive character away from the building.

He sauntered to his favorite spot in the middle of the bar where no one else but Froggy the bartender had been present. Everyone else in the bar lurked in the corners and side-tables as if they were actively avoiding the middle of the bar where Jim infamously sat.

            “What can I do for ya, Jim?” Froggy said with a wink. Jim felt well-liked by the bartender, but it was probably because he kept the business alive.

            Jim’s voice was a foghorn over the background chatter. “The usual, buddy.” Both of them had come to understand Jim’s “usual” was straight up rum—a real sailor’s drink. Like a hermit crab, his fingers retreated into his back pockets and found several coins, then proceeded into slamming them onto the bar.

The amount of pitiful, but it surely made Jim feel like he was the richest guy in the village (not many people could afford a drink every day). Jim thought maybe the skinny lady from two seats down would see his wealth and she would flock over to him and say: _oh my, you’ve got quite the loot there, would’ya mind buying me some whiskey? Perhaps ale?_ She gave a cursory glance at Jim, dropped her eyes unimpressively at the coins, and then turned back into her own private corner as if she found Jim unworthy of her maidenhead.

            Froggy’s hands shook as they carried Jim’s drink to the bar. The big guy wasn’t sure if it was because the old fart was scared, a druggie, or both. The bartender said without looking into Jim’s steady eyes:

 “Hey mate, you heard of the new guy in town?” The old man’s voice was casual. Maybe he wasn’t scared so it had to be the drugs, then, Jim thought passively. He wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent certain if Froggy was on the _good stuff_ , but he’d seen the guy once in a broom closet with his back facing him and his head crammed above a table as sniffles escaped his nostrils. No, it was his dead father who had happened to share the same silvery-white, moplike hair and pasty eyes as the bartender.

            Jim held his index finger, which was bent at a crooked angle like a hitchhiker’s thumb. _One second,_ he signaled. He brought the glass to his mouth and drank until the glass was half-empty. The bartender had given him an extra-large serving which Jim took gratefully without notice. “Nah, I came outta bed ten minutes ago, so this better be worth talkin about.” An obnoxious burp escaped his lips as if it had been brewing for years in the pits of hell.

To be honest, The Harbor always had random people coming in and out with most of them sticking around for a day. Most of them found the rank smell of fishiness too much for their spoiled sniffers. Froggy had told multiple stories about his encounters with the tourists and one time he had met a lad who was child-sized. The guy had a strange slant to his eyes and whatever he spoke was so heavily accented from a land far away it came out as gibberish. He was here one day and gone the next.

            It was probably another idiot.

            Froggy laughed and Jim was sure the old fart was high on something. The laugh was a pathetic, nervous cackle eerily reminding Jim of his dead father. _Hey, Jimbo, why don’t ya hang around with your father no more?_ Goodness, his voice must’ve belonged to a mad scientist.

            “Shut up and tell me about the new visitor,” Jim said, growing steadily hotter. He felt like he was talking to his father who had made him angry for most days. The old bartender leaned against the bar and there was a darkness veiling his eyes.

            “I only heard the rumors, never seen the man myself. They said he don’t speak much, said he was probably lookin’ for a hoe to bang headboards with, they said he was troubled by the way he looked, they said he must be a Texan or someshit, I dunno. They said—“

            “What the hell’s a Texan doin in our town?” Jim interrupted. The news was alarming to a simple-minded man like Jim. He wouldn’t understand people who traveled around the world existed because he hadn’t done it himself. Froggy reassured him it was a rumor and maybe it wasn’t a Texan. If the bartender had heard the stranger’s voice he would’ve been able to tell where it belonged.

            “Are you telling me he’s an alien?” Jim said. He was frustrated like a kid who kept getting that one math problem wrong and they couldn’t understand why. The Harbor was a tiny dot on the eastern coast and thousands of miles away from Arizona or Texas or wherever the hell the visitor came from. Jim had never walked further than a few blocks down the street, so Jim could never fathom the amount of distance the traveler had passed.

            “Did he have a horse or something? There’s no way he could ever do that on foot.” Jim said, now he was getting curious. He finished the rest of his drink and grunted with pleasure.

            Froggy groaned, growing impatient. The look in his eyes had been friendly until Jim began his stupid flock of questions. Jim bowed his head, the talk of the stranger had chased all the calmness out of his heart and he had felt a widening fear in his head. The world was a lot larger than he thought.

            Jim waited for the bartender to continue, and the bartender began:

            “People have told me he came from a stranger land than what we already know of. An orb-reader told me he read the dude’s fortune from afar, said he don’t belong in this world. I don’t know, mate, something’s not quite right.” Froggy’s voice was so hushed Jim had to lean close.

            “Bullshit, there ain’t no fortune teller in this village,” Jim protested. The first signs of intoxication were easing into him: “Fortune” had come out as “ _Fwortin”_. The world around him rocked back and forth steadily and there was a spinning image of the glass he drank from. The background chatter became more or less like pink static. A man with a hat and a crossbow slung on his back occupied the seat next to Jim.

            Froggy turned to look at the new visitor. “What can I get—“his eyes widened and his complexion became pallid as he stopped in his tracks. The fear in Froggy’s eyes was infectious, much so affecting Jim’s own conscience as well. He did not like to think of who the man sitting next to him was and how he had managed to scare the shit out of Froggy.

            “Gin. Straight gin.” The voice was a low—an almost despairing grumble, but it had Jim’s undivided attention. It didn’t carry with it the familiar fisherman quality Jim spoke with (heavily stressed r’s, almost pirate-like) but instead the voice scraped his ears like it was from an old, archaic voice speaking to him. The stranger’s clothes looked like they were straight out of the Wild West with a long, black coat and a handsome hat to top it off. Something like that belonged in a museum, Jim thought.

            The crossbow strings looked tighter than a bass note on a piano, and the bolt idled in the barrel of the crossbow could’ve split a person’s head in two, like a harpoon. The stranger must’ve killed dozens of people with it and maybe a couple of tigers and bears and birds. Jim was a sucker for exotic looking things and weapons, but this seemed too much for him like it was an evil treasure riddled with curses.

            Froggy returned with the stranger’s ale. A lime had been tucked aslant in the dusty glass, giving it the appearance of an ass-crack. Jim noticed the bartender’s hands shaking more uncontrollably than it had done before, and the stranger was sitting back like it was nothing. What the hell was up with Froggy? He went from a chatty old man to a quivering, silent mess in under a minute. The stranger plucked the lime-wedge and chugged the entire glass, impressing and scaring Jim at the same time. Jim looked for a reason, any reason, whether it was bad, stupid, or good, to start bickering his mouth at the new guy. That was when he realized the stranger hadn’t paid yet.

“Hey, buddy.” He said in a heroic tone. “How about you cough up the dough and maybe I won’t have to break your face in?” Jim waited eagerly and he was rewarded with a silent complaint from the stranger—a middle finger. And for once, Jim saw a grin cracking the man’s bearded face like the way bullets crack glass, but it had only shown for a second before closing again into a tightly pressed line.

            “Hello?” Another word escaped his mouth long before the regret and shame came. It hung suspended in the air never to be returned. Jim felt the need to flail his own middle finger—both of them—in front of the stranger’s face. That ought to wipe the smirk off his face.

            Froggy watched the sailor passively and a sweat had broken out on his forehead in small beads. The bartender tried to warn him to leave the drinker alone, but he felt like his tongue was tied and his feet were anchored by an invisible hand. He was caught in a frozen stupor like the moment where you know you had to do something, but all you could do is watch and do nothing while terrible things played in front of you.

Without warning, the glass in Jim’s hand exploded and covered his hand with rum-soaked fragments. Shards found a new home in the stranger’s dark clothes. They clung like crystal vines and refracted the dimmed sunlight from a dusty window. The stranger wiped the twinkling dust off his clothes with a casual pat. To Jim, it looked like the stranger didn’t care at all and Jim had felt completely invisible to the stranger. It was like sitting in a room with someone whom he suspected was perfectly capable of surrendering a response, but instead sat petrified like a stone while focusing all their mental energies on ignorance. 

            “The fuck is your problem? You a _simpleton_ or what?” Jim’s hand snatched the man’s shoulder and he felt a sudden jerk tug his arm another way. He had upset the angry lion inside of the stranger, but it was a fight he yearned for all his life. The skinny lady who sat two seats down had shuffled away. He had the stranger’s attention at last, who had finally stopped counting sheep in his head.

            “ _Shut up_.” The stranger said, not moving another inch. Jim retreated his hand slowly as if the stranger’s shoulder was slowly heating up, but the anger boiling inside his own body was far greater than what the stranger had been brewing. Froggy turned away, trying to wipe the images of fighting away from his mind as he swept the broken glass shards off the floor. He knew something bad was about to happen.

            Jim raised his fist and biffed the stranger. The stranger’s nose was reshaped into a squashed tomato and before he grabbed his crossbow, the brawny sailor grabbed him and threw the stranger across the bar. The man flew across the bar like an uncontrollable sled and his face collected shards of Jim’s abandoned glassware. While this had happened, Froggy backed against the wall and covered his eyes in disbelief.

            “Feels great, don’t it?” The big sailor said. He wanted a bar fight and now he had one.

            People filled the room with their despairing screams and some people escaped the bar in a massive exodus, like the skinny lady, but some stayed to enjoy the show. The stranger with the crossbow _thunked_ to the ground at the end of the bar and rolled to his feet, his crossbow lying out of his reach. Jim had never seen someone move so quickly before in his life, but the drunkenness made everything appear to move faster and faster. 

            _The crossbow!_ Jim thought, he needed to snatch it and thrust it on the ground and smash it into splintery pieces and—

Jim rushed over to the stranger, kicking dents into the ground like some kind of giant, portable sewing machine gone rabid. His hands had almost reached the crossbow when suddenly, it slipped away as he grabbed the air instead. In his fever to get to the crossbow, he had built too much momentum, which had knocked him onto his face after he suddenly stopped. It didn’t help he was drunk and too slow in his big body.

            The stranger’s boots clacked. At first, they were loud enough to indicate close proximity until they tapered off into little taps from far away. Maybe the guy was making a run for it, Jim half-expected, half-hoped. Whether he liked it or not, he was scared shitless and he felt every inch of regret coursing through his body as he craned his neck and saw _him_ —standing like those gunslingers in those old black-and-white photos—except instead of a revolver, the stranger had a crossbow directed at Jim. The rest of the observers had escaped the bar knowing if they had stayed, they would join Jim to the grave.

            A constant stirring, whining sound had replaced the bar’s background clamor and it distinctly sounded like a woman screaming towards the blades of a whirling fan. _Eeee! Aaaaa!_ Somewhere in the screaming, a little _psshh-thunk!_ barged in.

The stranger had fired his crossbow.


	2. Chapter 2

            And the bolt struck the floor where Jim lay like a helpless cow. It was a warning shot. One of the most aggressive warning shots the stranger had ever fired. The bolt touched Jim’s cheek, but it did not scratch it. Instead, it was embedded in the planks of wood and parted the floor like the red sea. Despite the sudden brutality of the stranger’s deliberate misfire, Jim had controlled his bladder’s functionality and managed to not scream. Froggy, on the other hand, thought he heard Jim’s skull crack when the bolt launched from the crossbow. 

            Jim was thinking frantically. His head was too low for the stranger to get a clear shot. He was safe for now, but it was a matter of time before the stranger could move around and get a better angle. He decided to crawl to the bar, grab the revolver under the drawer, and slug the stranger. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard a door swing open and shut with so much force it had snapped him in a hurry.

            “Jim?” A nearby voice squawked. It probably came from the bar where Jim was headed. He prepared his slow crawl towards the bar and made sure to keep his head low.

            Don’t worry, old fart. Jim’s coming to save you and your goddamn bar, he’ll get rid of that crossbow-carrying mutt and then all the ladies will want him. I gotta get to your pistol and things’ll be easy pickings from then on. Jim grinned victoriously as he crawled over chipped glass and broken chair legs. He couldn’t see anything but the floor and the base of the wooden bar. It was tempting to look at the stranger, but he worried for a second if he had shown his head, he would be drowned in bolts the next moment. The stranger was oddly quiet but Jim could feel his presence growing upon him like a shadow cast from an overhanging light.

            The sailor reached the bar and scrambled under cover. He dragged his body over Froggy’s skinny legs, who had winced and bitched as he went to the pistol.

            “Jim,” Froggy said, his voice was louder, urgent.

            Jim said nothing as he rummaged through the bottom cupboard of the bar. His hands made clanging noises with the forks, spoons, and glassware he spilled on the floor. He heard the bartender and thought, no worries, old man, let Jim here take care of things and he’ll get the mutt outta here soon.

            “Aha!” Jim said, his eyes widened with surprise and achievement. He had found the pistol at last. He hadn’t fired a gun in a long time, but he remembered firing a gun once when he was a kid. His father had told him not to use it, then when he was caught red-handed, his father had given him a long talk about guns.

            “Jim!” Froggy said again, this time, it amplified to an annoyed roar. In Jim’s drunken stupor, he mistook it for the stranger and it scared the living daylights out of him. How did the dude know his name? Oh smokes, now he was out to kill me. He’s probably standing right there with his big crossbow and as soon as I surface, he’ll send one right up my skull and—

            Jim stopped his train of thought. His brain had flipped a switch and any more sounds coming out of Froggy’s exasperated mouth had become nothing but blank vibrations in the air. Jim rose from his hiding spot and shouted:

            “You’ll regret ever coming into my town, buddy!”

            Jim pulled the trigger with his finger. The gun in his hand boomed like thunder as shots were fired one after another. Bullets went flying in all directions as Jim flaunted the gun in random zig-zag motions. He shot a chandelier, which came crashing down in a waterfall of glass as particles spewed into the air. Another bullet had struck a table leg, it was one of the tables that already had three legs, and so once three became two, the table became nothing more than a ramp for a tiny carriage. A window adopted a spider web crack with a gaping hole at the center, only God would’ve known where the bullet had ended.

            “How do you like that, huh?” Jim said, still furiously clicking the gun which was now drained of all its ammunition. It took him seconds to notice it was empty, and when he finally realized, he had dropped the gun on the floor.

            Jim looked at the mess he had made. He ignored the bullet holes, splinters of wood, and shards of glass strewn around like a tornado wreck. What had mattered to him was the dead body of the mysterious stranger; he would turn over the corpse and take the stranger’s beautiful crossbow and call it _Rosaline_.

            It was completely empty. The scene looked like a foreclosed bar from a few decades ago. There wasn’t any dead body like he had expected, only the aftermath of his extremely unskilled shooting—copper wires of a chandelier swinging with residual momentum. For a moment, he thought, maybe he had overkilled the man, shot him so many times he had obliterated the body completely. It brought a sneer to his mouth, which quickly disappeared when he asked himself, _where is he?_

            Jim turned his head to face his old friend. “Where is he? Where’d he go, huh?” There must have been a reason why the old man had desperately tried to get his attention, and then it occurred to him, maybe he had seen where the mysterious stranger had gone, and it had probably happened right after he finished crawling his way over to the bar, and now it was too late—the stranger would be on his feet again, travelling his thousand miles before Jim could even sober up.

            “He’s gone, Jim. Christ in a shitstorm, don’t you _ever_ listen? I’ve been trying to tell you, but you were too busy vandalizing my shit!” Jim didn’t like the look of Froggy’s eyes. They were angry and serious and they made him feel like he was a little boy in trouble all over again. The mistake had hit him pretty hard. So all this time while he was carrying out his little plan to get to the bar and get the gun and end the stranger, the stranger had actually taken the opportunity to slip away. Dammit! If he had looked and listened, maybe then he wouldn’t have fucked up so much.

            “So did you see him?” Jim said. He had a little hope maybe the old fart had seen where the guy had gone off. A left or a right or maybe even straight ahead was a good place to start.

            The bartender shook his head, a little viciously as if he was extremely pissed. “I was too busy duckin’ and coverin’ while you were shittin’ all over the place.” A frown sagged his pallid face and Jim felt sorry, not for the poor bastard, but for himself. He almost had the guy, what could he have done to secure his victory? He considered it for a moment, frowning. I should’ve choked him instead of throwin’ him across the slutty bar, that’s what I should’ve done. Oh man, what the hell was I thinking?

            “What am I gonna do?” Froggy’s voice contained an anger and hopelessness sympathizing with the way Jim currently felt. “It’ll take weeks and all my savings to repair the damn place.”

            “I dunno.” Jim took a seat next to Froggy. The alcohol had hit him, but not harder than the realization of his own stupid mistake. He was a sad and drunk man, sitting next to another sad, not-so-drunk man in a wrecked bar.

            “Christ,” Froggy muttered. The anger in his voice had whittled down to a sorrowful tenor. “I’m gonna have to sell this shithole. I’d be luckier than a historian finding Atlantis if I could find some poor sap to buy this place—hell, ain’t no fuckin’ way I’d ever be able to convince anybody—hey, you should buy this completely useless dump, it’ll be a great investment! Jim, you used to be so good to me. You shat coins outta your asshole and smacked them into my hands, you breathed life into this shithole, and now you took it down. I guess you’re the one who’s to blame, and you’re gonna be the one payin’…”

            …Jim had fallen asleep to the old man’s words. He found an oddly calming temptation in Froggy’s voice like bedtime stories and midnight romances, despite how badly he wanted Jim to offer compensation for his recklessness. Sometimes when the old man droned on and on, he would listen without actually listening and then his eyelids would suddenly feel like ten-pound weights and then he would be caressed by sleep and the old man’s nostalgic, calming voice. His head bobbed a little before it finally surrendered to dreams, and it drooped forward giving him the appearance of the dead, then he heard dizzying voices dancing in his head like unfinished ideas as he retreated into the blackness of his mind, and then the man with dark western clothes appeared before him, a dark silhouette against the tranquil twilight, grass climbing up to the stranger’s knees swiveled on invisible puppet strings, and then the stranger had walked forward into the purplish-bluish horizon line, becoming smaller and smaller, yet the image yanked at the dreaming man’s head… his hands longed after the stranger and then a disembodied voice said: _don’t you ever listen? Jim, you’ll never get what you want, you’ll never have it if you don’t listen, listen to me for once and then…_ The voice had trailed off, yet the words hung suspended in the dreamy land like blown dandelion seeds. The man had disappeared and left a trail of footprints in the dewy grass, suddenly Jim felt his legs move, he was following the trail like some lost puppy looking for its master, then his legs broke into a slow and arduous sprint—running in dreams always seemed to be the hardest thing to do—and the grass around his legs tickled so badly he needed to stop and itch his legs, so he reached with his arms and—

            Jim snapped awake. The first thing he felt was a painful throb in his temples as if someone had planted mini silicon bombs inside his head and set each one on a timer so each bomb would detonate one after the other in a synchronized orchestra. Froggy had taken some rags and covered Jim with them, but only Jim’s legs because the bartender had unfinished angst from the shootout. It provided him with the tickly feeling in the dream, which had not only prompted the sailor awake but seemingly saved him from a dream that would’ve turned into a nightmare if he were to continue pursuing after the stranger. The second thing Jim felt was loneliness. There had been an old man sitting next to him, but there was nothing but a cold spot where the old bartender had been. Cold and empty, Jim thought as his hand brushed over the spot where Froggy was slumped over, _like my heart_. It was completely dark, and now Jim had wished he had aimed a little better so he wouldn’t destroy the chandelier.

            The third thing he felt was the urge to puke.

            The big sailor kicked the rags off of his ankles as if his legs were dipped in sticky goo. Most of his energy was focused on getting towards the sink and not tripping on the mess he had made while looking for the revolver. He had dozed off before the evening twilight and it was pitch-black all around, so it must have been midnight or a little after. Right now he wasn’t completely alert. Moving one foot in front of the other, keeping a hand on the wooden bar so he wouldn’t fall, and trying to navigate in the dark proved to be difficult tasks.

            When he found a faint outline—squareish, with a metal hose at the center to indicate a sink, he had let it all out. Acid erupted from his mouth in a burning, silent, and messy waterfall. Little drops dribbled under his chin, sneaking across his neck and merging into his collar. He’d been through this experience once before, and that was his first time when he was fifteen and going through his father’s medicine cabinet when he found the vodka and being young and careless, he drank a fourth of the bottle before the bitter taste drove him away. Afterward, he had learned to take alcohol and conquer it, like it was a poison you could build a tolerance against. Nonetheless, he had never felt as sick as he did until now, spilling the rest of his stomach into a dark, contained space. He could imagine the stranger, standing behind him, pointing his crossbow at the back of his head and laughing while he said: _you fuckin’ lightweight! I could’ve drunk ten times as much as you did and I’d be able to walk off in a straight line!_ Since he had only heard the stranger’s voice once (and that was a cursory moment), he had imagined his voice to be the same as his father’s smack talking voice.

            His throat burned and his lips were unpleasantly wet. He reached for the tail of his shirt, raised it to his mouth, and wiped it until it felt sandpaper dry. The buzzy feeling was mitigated by his puking and was instead replaced by hunger. If only his mother was still around to fetch him a meal. God, he had never felt lonelier than now, standing over a sink of his own vomit in the dark so his olfactory senses were dialed to overdrive. So hungry and so cold from the nightly breeze carrying whisks of ocean scent.

Froggy must’ve gone back to the shack, he thought. Something else prodded his mind like a painful needle. Where the hell did the stranger go? Then he remembered the dewy grass in the dream, which was now escaping his mind like stars chasing the darkness, the dream didn’t seem to go anywhere and he felt as lost in reality as he had been in the dream. Jim shuffled out of the bar space and outside of the Fish Stain, unconsciously amazed he didn’t step on glass or hit his little toe against a table leg. God, that would’ve hurt a thousand times over.

            He closed the door behind him and looked around, he didn’t need to close the door with the bar in ruins, but it was an old, automatic habit and no one was in sight to point fingers at him. The food stands near the town center had been chained and suddenly Jim felt his stomach growl. The sight of the food stands flooded his memory with the food his mother had brought home, and he wanted to sink his teeth into freshly cooked salmon because the taste in his mouth had gone horribly rotten from the puking and wretching earlier.

            Momma used to cook him his favorite dish—no, it wasn’t salmon—the dish he always had on Thursday nights was a nice and juicy steak. Not only was this steak enjoyable, but it gave him something to look forward to. As a poor boy with a father who was missing half of the time (probably getting drunk or going on an “adventure” as he used to call them), there wasn’t much excitement in his life so even a promised weekly meal was enough to please him. He’d be playing away from the yard because sometimes strange men came to the door and asked if his mother was home, instead of in the little backwoods behind the shack he had lived in all his life, and she would call out from the kitchen window: _Jimmy, mamma made you something special!_ He could already smell the steak from outside. Oh, how it seemed to caress his nose with the blissful taste of grilled cow meat, how it turned his tongue into a saturated sponge, dripping with a wolf’s savage hunger, how it enabled him to run faster than a real adventurer in a race to get to the good stuff. Those memories were distant, yet they always found a sick way to remind him of how good the past had treated him.

            Jim went back to his cabin where he armed himself with his .22 rifle after he ate day-old beans spread on stale white bread. The stranger who came around sundown had left long ago. The stranger had given Jim a new purpose. Fishing and drinking? He was ready to abandon everything—well, except for the latter—and go hunting for his holy grail, except instead of saving it, he’d stick a knife into the base of the stranger’s skull when he was sleeping, yeah, and then he’d take the crossbow with him and become a lone ranger. The thoughts brought a warm sensation to Jim’s groin.

            “I’ll find you, stranger-with-a-crossbow. I’ll find you _real_ good.” He punctuated his words with a mischievous chuckle and slammed his fist into the open palm of his other hand. The sun would not have returned for a couple of hours when Jim had locked the door of his cabin, rifle slung over his back, knife tucked in his holster on the side of his leg, and mind swirling with fantasies about how he would finish the stranger.

            And then he was off.

 


	3. Chapter 3

            The moon was still visible as Jim walked along the grassy landscape. It was nearly time for the moon to fade into nothing as the horizon began to glow faintly, like an oven warming to a pre-heat. There were other sources of light coming from the desolate Victorian houses and fishing huts nearby, and Jim wondered why the people inside them hadn’t blown out their candles yet, and somewhere in his gutter mind, he thought someone must’ve been having some “fun”. A white sign in the distance, turned gray from the darkness, had caught his interest and the sailor walked towards it.

            In big, bold and black words, it read: NOW LEAVING NORTH CAROLINA. Underneath those big letters in a cursive font: VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS.

            “Now leavin’ _ensee,_ ” Jim said aloud. He had lived in N.C. for his entire life and his feet had never touched ground beyond its borders. Twenty-eight years old, Jim Phillip was finally about to dirty the bottom of his hoofs with Virginian soil.

            But it felt fuckin’ bad to leave this place.

            It was his home, and, while it hadn’t been particularly as good to him as he had been to the Fish Stain, it was a life he had never wanted to escape. He would’ve continued his desultory routine of waking up, going fishing, getting paid, getting drunk, getting some “pussy”, and sleeping like a log. Now most of that was impossible with Froggy’s bar being stuck between a rock and a hard place and Jim knew his face wouldn’t be welcomed anymore. But still, he’d only been walking here for what, twenty, thirty minutes? It wasn’t too late to turn back and go home and forget about all this mess. Yeah, he could help Froggy rebuild so he could have his drinking place again.

            “Nah, I’m turning myself loose for you, stranger, even if it means black for Ole Jim.” He spoke his words which sounded dry in the humid North-Carolina-Now-Entering-Virginia-Air and as he spoke, he swiped at the air dismissively.

            He continued walking, adding distance between him and the sign. When the big and bold letters on the white sign had become nothing more than a tiny white rectangle in the distance, the orange-yellow rind of the sun had begun to peek across the horizon. A band of clouds stretched infinitely above the sun, making it look like a big Stetson, like the one the stranger wore when he came to Fish Stain. He did his best to avoid looking at the discomfiting image and continued walking along the beaten path until he discovered a new city named Courtland. By then, the sun was already at half-mast above the Stetson clouds, like a magical orb had risen from the depths of the stranger’s hat, bereaving the darkness Jim had felt a strange fondness for. He had left The Harbor adequately-fed and well-watered then came to Courtland with a growling stomach and chapped lips.

            Virginia’s not so bad. As he walked past tawdry signs which read: _Kent’s Krabs, THE PUB, Worldview Museum_ … he had already begun to feel sleepy. Might as well take a break when you’re exhausted, right? It wasn’t like a couple of naps would set the sailor too far off from the stranger, so he had collapsed in a dusty bedroom of Anabel’s Inn and mentally noted to look for the stranger again when he awoke.

            Jim slept dreamlessly… waking up later to find the sooty windows blazing with sunlight. Still daylight, he thought. Good, that would make it a helluva lot easier to continue his search for the stranger. He thought about his dream he had dreamed at the bar, images of the dewy grass and the dark silhouette of the stranger passing from him came back in little vignettes. No, he wasn’t there yet. When passing through N.C, there had been no dewy grass or misshapen footprints in the grass itself, and suddenly he asked himself why he ought to take directions from a dream.

            Because it felt _so_ real.

            Jim didn’t dream of people. Whenever the big guy slept and fell into the hands of the Dreamweaver, he would dream about empty canvasses; landscapes like the one he had passed by, normal scenery without any soul to look at like it was an unpainted dream some divine entity had planted in Jim’s mind without a road to follow. When he was fifteen and stupid, the same blank canvas had had another fifteen-and-stupid girl by the name Mary Manchester, a girl who always wore a headband over her dark and curly hair. Thing is, he’d never met this person at all in his life, didn’t even know her name. He just _knew_ it somehow, knew that her name was Mary Manchester and how she wore a headband over her dark and curly hair because she talked to him in the dream. _Come and get me, Jim. Come and get Mary Manchester while you’re still here._ She disappeared into the dark horizon like a water drop joining a puddle, losing its individuality and adding insubstantially to the mass it had joined.

            He had broken out in a cold sweat, and the first words to escape his dry, morning-rank mouth had been “Mary Manchester.” The dream wiped itself from his memory, as all dreams did, and later he wondered why he had uttered such an unfamiliar name, and then unlike _déjà vu_ , he had experienced _jamais vu._ He knew it was a dream and, that he met a girl named Mary Manchester. It was a premonition, a proposal, and a business deal in an abstract sort of way. He met her one day while sitting on a bench in the park and they locked eyes when she had sat next to him.

            _Mary Manchester._ His eyes bore into hers.

            _Jim Phillip._ Her eyes bore into his. Jim saw instant recognition in her hazel eyes and beyond that, a hint of pertness he could’ve easily mistaken as confusion.

            _“Come and get me, Jim.”_ She had said. The words were too familiar, and suddenly a fragment of the dream Jim had forgotten came back to him like a lost memory. _“Come and get Mary Manchester while you’re still here.”_ Her eyes broke contact with his as she skipped across the park, her figure an unshaped blob with flailing arms and flailing legs against the love-colored sky. He remembered the dream again and thought of how she slipped away so easily. He remembered wanting her so badly, but for what, he did not know, only _knew_ he had wanted her, and still did. He broke into a sprint, legs hammering the grass into green mudpies when his fingers clenched the hem of her silken dress, then suddenly she stopped and he had knocked her over on the ground and he was on top of her like a wild animal, and he knew what he wanted from her, as he pinned her down against the grass and made love to her that evening over on the wet grass.

            Was it fate? It was the only dream that had determined a big moment of his life, and now thirteen years later he had had the same type of dream, and he had the feeling it was going to be another sick and twisted adventure. Yes, fate had definitely brought him here, to Virginia, like it had brought him to Manchester, it had filled him with an urge so compelling he couldn’t resist and he had fallen to the deterministic behavior of the world. The difference was he had already met the stranger before he had had the dream, and he heeded no words from the silent man and then he wondered: was it me the stranger dreamed of? Is that why he had come from so far? But then why would he leave? This was the divine will’s way of saying it was Jim’s turn to take fate into his hands and follow it. It was time to figure out what the hell He had planned for him, time to find the stranger.

            Jim drew the curtains back from the windows and looked through the grime. A girl dashed across the streets with a bundle of papers cradled in the skinny crook of her arm. Two old people sat next to each other, talking about how their lives were so much different in the past. A man, wearing a sleeveless shirt, walked into a saloon with “THE PUB” in big, bold letters.

            His .22 rifle slanted against a clothes drawer, and the _baptizer_ he brought with him was on top of the drawer, its handle blending in with the oaken texture of the drawer. He grabbed his two precious belongings, adjusted his work shirt, and headed down the stairs of Anabel’s Inn. The past week had been unkind to him, but not as unkind as the stranger had been to him. The soles of his feet were wrung with soreness, the bones in his legs ached, and his stomach had knotted from the cheap meals he had consumed during his travels.

            He considered going to the pub. There was a feeling that maybe… just maybe the stranger would be there, ordering his straight-fuckin-gin and exalting people with one of his death-bolts. From somewhere nearby, the scent of bacon and the sound of sizzling eggs had drawn him to the diner section in the inn. He sat on one of the stools to get closer. The strong aroma of coffee aroused the hairs inside his nose, waking him up with a jolt of caffeine. 

            “Morning, big fella, what will you be having today?” She looked like a twenty-thirty something, who was easy in the eyes with a smile as wide as the sunny hills of Kansas. _I’d like to have you, baby._

            Jim pointed to a filled plate somewhere along the bar space he sat at. A man with a handlebar mustache gave him a bewildered look, looked at his plate, and dug into it. “Wakey-wakey, eggs-and-bakey. Make it happen, smooth.” He dropped a sly smile when he said _smooth_. Jim’s grin was infectious, perfected by all the experience he had in the Fish Stain when he slid into the panties of dirty whores and slatterns of all shapes and sizes. Jim don’t discriminate, Jim liked to have a good time, long as there was no fussin’ and bitin’. He did prefer a big ass, however.

            The waitress smiled back at him, although it didn’t reach her eyes. But Jim wasn’t looking at her face and instead his eyes dropped to her bosom. The tightness was limned in a sleek white blouse, like an oversized melon wrapped in linen. Jim’s gonna have to _up his game_ if he wanted to score some love, but then she was gone… already in the kitchen, he supposed, and her dull smile rested in his mind uneasily, then he thought about the stranger, the hunger and thirst were forgotten in an instant as he snapped like a psychopath. That _fuckin_ stranger, eh? All he remembered was the interestingly broad beard that hugged the stranger’s chin and cheeks, and the way the stranger’s dark hat covered the rest of the stranger’s face, giving no one the opportunity to see what the stranger’s eyes were really like. The eyes were a window into one’s soul, look into his eyes and you shall see all of his secrets, desires, and passions.

            The waitress returned and dumped the plate in front of Jim, and someone with a lonely-sounding voice called her over. Jim wolfed the contents of the plate down without really tasting it and afterward, he rushed to the pub.

            If the stranger had gone anywhere in this virgin city, it would’ve been here. Jim had a strange feeling maybe the mysterious man had been here, and another feeling, almost instinctual, that the stranger took a short slice of his time to down some gin or whiskey or whatever the _fuck_ people like _him_ drank these days—or, _those_ days. Something was off about the man, but Jim couldn’t quite place it, something about being in the wrong time-zone or something, like an oddball sent from a different timeline so it could spy or observe a different timeline. The ideas were vague and nothing more than a hunch to the sailor, and it quivered him to think of such things he had not thought of before.

            The pub had a cleanliness Jim had noticed when he befell the card tables, paintings of Abe Lincoln, whores winking from above, and _gosh darn_ when were whores ever allowed to look so clean? Another clean and trimmed face of freshness belonged to the server at the bar, which was a stark contrast to the stinking and piss-poor character of Freddy “Froggy” Nelson. Jim thought maybe the owner of the Fish Stain would’ve loved a pub like this, full of glassware so clear you could use em like mirrors, bustling with gentlemen who wore undusted civvies. Jim took a stool at the front of the bar and no one had purged themselves away from him.

            A cold crunch drew his gaze towards a large and rectangular machine-thing. By gods, it was an ice-maker! So cool, he thought, _literally_ cool, as the machine punched out crystal-clear cubes of creek water into a purely white bowl. Back at The Harbor, there would’ve been no opportunity for a working thing like this to have a peaceful life. There were too many gold-diggin bastards, enough to make a kingdom out of, that an ice maker would last the Fish Stain as good as an hour before it was in another man’s hands. Here, the people were of good conscience, probably good enough to leave your doors unlocked and even if you had a bar of gold lying about, one of the sirs or madams would knock on your door and return it, Jim sure could live here, it was definitely the type of place he’d—

            “How’s your fire, sir?” A gentleman’s voice called out to him, snapping him out of his reverie. Here he was thinking about a good life, and then a man had kicked him out of it.

            “Hey, I was thinkin! I don’t need no brain-dead cocksucker such as yourself to pull me out of my hopes and desires.” Jim turned to his left to stare at the interloper and behind him, there was a clock. It was ten minutes past ten. The man with a carefully groomed mustache and bold hair had the balls to confront him. “So who the fuck are you?” Jim said casually.

            The man stiffened a little, taken aback by Jim’s foul mouth. His brown eyes had a look of recognition in them as if he had placed Jim in his proper place. “The stink in your breath strongly tells me you’re not from around here,”—he extended a hand—“Fine day, stranger, m’name’s Henry Diamond.”

            Jim’s temper was rising again. Henry had pointed out his fart-breath, and Jim did not appreciate the gesture. Nonetheless, he seized the hand—with a bit more force than he expected—and shook it up and down firmly three times, then his eyes twinkled when he saw Henry looking like a pained dog. “Fine day to you, fucker. I’m Jim Phillip. I bring my stinkin’ shit-breath to you from The Harbor.”

            Henry had been frowning a little, there had always been a slight sorrow in the corner of his mouth, Jim noticed, but once the pleasantries were returned, a grin had suffused the man’s slightly rugose face. Idly massaging the hand which he had used to shake Jim’s iron-grip, he said, “Let me buy you a drink.”

            Jim chuckled and clapped his hands on his lap with eagerness. “Now you’re speakin my language.”

            Henry had a whiskey with ice from the ice machine while Jim had a whole bottle of rum (his usual go-to) and they had spoken about their years of living in a matter of hours, although it was Jim who had done most of the talking and being easily sidetracked, he had gotten to talking about how his mother used to pinch his ears and stuff his mouth with a bar of soap whenever he was caught mirroring his father’s mouth. The gentleman, which Jim noticed was wearing an expensive suit with pants and loafers to match, had always asked the right questions behind his slightly tilted frown. It then became known to the sailor he was talking to a businessman, who had regularly dealt with commerce between Virginia and N.C, and all other sorts of places, then Jim asked if he had any Carolinian “pussy”, which Henry did not take a welcome gesture to, and Jim had swatted the question away like it was a stupid mosquito, chuckled at himself, and chased the shame away with more rum.

            Jim looked at the clock again. Two hours had passed. _Two hours!_ Jim looked out the window, the sun-up was apparent by its dirty yellow glow in the white blinds, and the pub itself had roared into loud, indistinguishable conversations as thirty minutes past twelve came by. The bowl which the ice maker had been acquainted with had become a bowl of water… which the server would later use for cleaning or drinking. Here he was, making friends with a fuckin businessman named Henry Diamond, and forgetting completely what he had come into the pub in the first place for.

            “Hey,” Jim called, the gentleman had slapped a bill onto the bar and looked at Jim with ease. “Before you hang your hat—speakin of _hats_ , mind you, Have you seen anyone around who was about this tall—“ Jim brought his palm, parallel to the ornate floorboards, and raised it to his nose—“Wears a hat, not just any regular old hat, but a black one, a Stetter, or whatever those damn Westerners called it, and uh, a long, black coat, and—“

            The crossbow, Jim, don’t forget about the crossbow. And don’t forget his cold, empty, and despairing eyes… eyes he didn’t know the color of or didn’t know if they had color. Are you sure you want to spill all of it to this rich man, Jim? You’d be signing your death warrant.

            “S-Shut up!” The sailor said. His words cut the stale air like a steak knife and the gentleman gave him a concerned look. Jim shook his head and continued, “This guy, he had a big thing on his back, a-a crossbow or something.” Oh, this was ridiculous, why would a down-to-earth, non-religious businessman such as Henry Diamond ever believe something as absurd as this? Jim wanted to take the gentleman’s throat and squeeze the life out of the gentleman so he’d never have to hear the shame spewing from this miser’s mouth when he’d soon be called a lunatic.

            Henry did nothing Jim had expected and smiled. The frown was long forgotten and the gentleman answered:

            “I might know a thing or two. I see hundreds, if not— _thousands_ of pedestrians a day.”

            Jim’s eyes peered with deep focus and he could almost feel himself bending on his knees and holding his hands in prayer. God almighty, let this poor old sailor find his mysterious tormentor and put an end to it.

            “Tell me everything,” he said. Jim was praying in the back of his head, silently hoping the rich man was joking because he was too afraid to confront the truth… later they would talk it out in Henry’s big mansion.


	4. Chapter 4

            The next morning, Jim Phillip had woken up in Henry Diamond’s spare room, which had been mostly bare except for a few unopened crates of the businessman’s belongings. He rubbed his eyes, groaned stinkily, and trudged to the lobby. Alabaster-white curtains were drawn back to reveal the morning sun’s lazy rays, those of which had begun to penetrate Jim’s unadjusted eyes as he staggered on the smooth, polished staircase with his gutting hand providing shade. The light from the curtains had also revealed an exotic Indian rug centered on the floor of the lobby of the big house, a bright yellow rectangle crossing the matted fur. A man who travels a lot, Jim thought, must’ve had the strange idea of buying the most absurd and useless things. And perhaps this mansion was Henry Diamond’s personal keepsake for all the wealth he had accumulated from his career, quite impressive.

            A man had called from the fireplace, it was Henry himself. “You look much better than you did at the pub, Mr. Phillip.” It was a lie. Jim’s hair was a sea of tangled blackness, one that looked no more than a bed of seaweed or a strip of wild-grass, and drool which had hardened to a translucent scale had crusted over on his cheek. However, the bluish-purple crescents under his eyes had faded into a ruddy afterglow.

            Henry was a rich man who had nothing more to do in his life other than make his money work for him. He didn’t need a wife when he was practically married to his immeasurable wealth, and only on Sundays did a maid come into the big house and clean after messes which were unnoticed by Jim. The rich man had let the sailor stay at his place for gratis, his excuse? He’d always wanted something to keep his mind busy.

            Jim, hungover, replied sourly. “You’d do best to call me Jim unless you don’t mind having bullets up your ass.” He wiped his cheek and the dried spit had fallen onto the floor like shredded paper. “So, what’s for breakfast?” He looked at Henry, incapacitated by hunger.

            Ten minutes later, the two of them had gone to Anabel’s Inn for breakfast, and Jim instantly recognized the fancy laddie who had excited his desire. He had asked her how much she cost when Henry vigorously coughed and gave Jim a disapproving look. After that, they had ordered eggs and bacon and waited without speaking. After the food had arrived, their eight minutes were filled with continued silence and chomping, and sometimes Jim looked at Henry’s unsmiling eyes and thought, _what’s gotten a stick up his ass lately?_

            Jim was grateful for all the information he had been given from the rich man, and what benefit could the businessman ever gain? He considered, then Jim decided if the man didn’t seek anything in return, he must’ve been brainwashed, or something. What the sailor had been told last night confirmed the appearance of the stranger. He stopped by in Virginia, Jim was told, and then the stranger left, without a trace, but what Henry could see in the stranger’s personality had left him with a bitter feeling in his mouth. Henry told Jim it was a bad call to pursue _that_ man, because he had had the feeling of, you know, that feeling when you walk into a rumored haunted house and for a heart-stopping second, you feel some unearthly presence which sucks and tears at the soul so morbidly it makes whatever you thought of doing become that of running. Henry had _warned_ Jim to not continue his vendetta and had told Jim to think it over. The sailor was ready with his decision and as soon as he finished the last strip of bacon, he talked.

            “I’m doing it, I’m going after the gold,” Jim said, looking carefully at Henry.

            The businessman smiled, whatever had been bothering him had been lifted away, completely abated with good cheer. Jim returned the smile himself, confused, and waited for the odd man’s response. Was he happy about Jim’s decision to risk his neck for something completely forgivable and forgettable? Or perhaps it was the irony, that no matter how convincing Henry was about leaving and forgetting this vindictive pursuit, that Jim had utterly decided otherwise.

            “What?” Jim scoffed, molding the smile back into a frustrated frown.

            “I knew you wouldn’t let it rest.” Henry chuckled, then his face turned serious and his eyes veiled. “You’re playing yourself a fool, Jim, and I really didn’t think I needed to tell you this _twice_ , but nonetheless here it is: do not play with the devil, or you will regret it.”

            “I thought you weren’t religious.” That was the first thing Jim pointed out.

            In a different voice, Henry said, “That man you were chasing after scared the light into me.” His brown eyes were brimming with insanity, like when Froggy had freaked out over his ruined business. Supposedly every man turned to the divine when they were stuck in a dark corner.

            “He let me live,” Jim said blankly.

            “Then consider yourself lucky,” Henry said immediately after. His hands were shaking and, for the longest moment, there was no resolution to the fear Henry felt. Jim remained on the stool, his eyes stared at Henry’s finicky hands, but they were not really looking at them, and the waitress had cleared the bar space without him knowing since he was thinking again. Yes, it was true, perhaps even a miracle, how the stranger had let Jim live. The sailor was more of a stupid threat to the stranger than the stranger was to the sailor, and both being unsure strangers to each other, it wouldn’t have mattered to a man like the stranger to have the death of a random sailor on his mind. So why was Jim here now, living, breathing, and still talking? There could only be one answer, and it was the same answer Jim had had on his mind since he had left the ruined Fish Stain.

            Because he had been given a chance to avenge his pride.

            “No… that man made me a fool of myself. I can’t let him get away with it.” Jim said, breaking the bubble of silence between them. Henry shook his head.

            “Don’t let the downfall of your ego be the cause of your death. Mr. Phil—Jim, I should go and—“

            Jim snatched Henry’s sleeve, like the way he had grabbed the stranger by the shoulder, and remembering this, the sailor had suddenly released his hands as if he had been plagued by a bad idea. Henry looked at him one last time. The brown eyes were darker than ever from their talk of unnatural things, if only he had been able to tell it was inexorable for Jim to have wanted vengeance. _Come with me_ , Jim wanted to say to him. Not only did Henry see the stranger, but he had also _believed_ Jim, which he had sincerely doubted in their initial acquaintance. Somehow Jim had the feeling Henry belonged somewhere in his quest, how he would need the rich man and time would tell what he would fulfill. This man had shown Jim kindness and understanding, but why? He guessed the rich man shared the same infliction Jim currently beheld, but the rich man was too reluctant. _We can take him down together_.

            But Henry Diamond was absent.

            Jim checked the mansion, his knuckles knocked dully against the heavy door separating inside from outside—and no answer had come from the inside, but Jim had a feeling Henry was in there. It was no use to Jim to try recruiting a hopeless victim of the stranger. He took on to the roads, heading north, as Henry had directed him earlier. In his mind was a vacancy he had recognized as loneliness, the same kind of loneliness he had felt when he woke to find Froggy long gone from the bar, and now Henry was gone, too. Maybe those two were right to stay behind, lock themselves up, and forget about all of this.

            But to Jim, it was impossible.

The sailor passed Anabel’s Inn, then the old people on the bench, then the girl, who was now knocking on the door of an unwelcome-looking house. His life was fucked up because he had chosen to bear the path of a vengeful man. He could’ve lived the rest of his life like the girl, not passing around news but still doing work nonetheless as a fisherman, and then retired like the old people.

            He passed a gem shop with a sign which read _Goldman Jewelers_ and a post office called _Kotler’s Delivery_. By then, the view of Henry’s mansion was long gone. The streets were filled with unfamiliar faces and strange men in poorly clothes calling out for others to buy pickaxes and lanterns.

            Virginia ain’t so bad, eh? Well, _screw_ this place! I almost forgot why I came here, and now that I have my answer—that the stranger isn’t fuckin here—I should go. Jim’s face, set in a rictus of sworn determination, looked onward. Up ahead, there were more buildings covering the left and right side of town and even further ahead, he saw the same green pathway he had taken before entering the city. Henry had told him the stranger had gone this way, but that was all he had been told. It was a shame the rich man didn’t want to come, and another shame Jim had to take his leave so quickly.

            “ _Wait!”_ The hairs on the nape of his neck erected to the sudden sound. Jim stopped walking, but he did not turn. He knew who it was.

            “Wait, Mr. Phil—Jim.” Henry stood panting behind the sailor, and when Jim finally turned, he saw a man whose suit was dampened with sweat. He had never seen someone so out of shape before, and the arduous breathing Henry exhibited had oozed a sense of worry into him.

            “Are you poorly, rich guy?” Jim said, half-worried.

            Henry breathed and breathed. It looked like the man was over-exaggerating his own labor.

            “Let me”—cough—“convince you, Jim.” Henry stood straight and patted his suit, although there weren’t any clumps of dirt lodged in it. “Sojourn with us awhile, allow me and you to estivate while we still can, while we still have a grasp of life. You should not give yourself to the dark one, the dark one will surely find no appeal to your re-visitation. Please, Jim.”

            Henry paused, waiting for Jim to say something, but the sailor had no words. Jim watched as the rich man’s torso expanded with every breath he drew, and he focused on the raspy air which whittled from Henry’s throat. The man must have been smoking a cigar… or cigarette. The sun had beaten on Jim’s face and beads of sweat surfaced above his thick eyebrows.

            “Three days,” Henry continued, “Stay with me three days while you reconsider your dilemma. Allow me as a friend and as a fellow human being, to save you from a lost cause.”

            “ _I am not a lost cause!”_ Jim yelled. Henry flinched and his body jerked backward so suddenly… and his eyes widened with fear. What did it matter to this imposing, rich figure, whether or not a worthless piece-of-shit like Jim lived or not? What was he so afraid of? Jim balled his fists. There was no good running away from your fears. You either confronted them and beat them, or let them kill you. Jim wanted to be free from this baleful curse in his life and whatever the rich man had suggested to him about fleeing and hiding for the rest of his life had disgusted him on a whole new level.

            In a still, but predator-like voice, Jim said: “I’m not lettin it go. If you let it go, it will gnaw at you like maggots on a dead corpse until you go batshit insane and you’ll regret never doing something about it.” He looked at Henry, whose face was passive, but deep and reflecting. _You’re the lost cause_ , Jim thought, _because you’re too much of a pussy to do away with your evils._

            Jim turned around, this time, he wouldn’t look back—no, not at the miserable rich fool. Let the weak do as they wish, while himself, a strong and willing man, should go and conquer his beasts. He began walking towards the green path, leaving Henry forever.


	5. Chapter 5

            If there was something Henry had achieved, it was the fact that he had helped Jim allay some of his barriers regarding the confrontation of the stranger. Jim couldn’t figure out why he was so angry at Henry—or himself. He allowed the stranger to break his ego, as Henry would have put it, and let one little problem turn into a bigger problem. But his mind was set. With renewed vigor, he was going after the man with the western clothing and crossbow. If more people like Henry or Froggy were to obstruct his path, he would have no dickering with them.

            He was on the outskirts of Courtland, now, and a nuthatch sang a wild tune somewhere safe and high where dogs and cats wouldn’t be able to reach. The words of his father had reminded him: _Hold it, Jim, and aim with your eye, not with your hand, or surely you will miss._ This was the day when Jim had been caught red-handed with Edmond Philip’s Colt Diamondback in his sweating and shaking palms. His father had placed a hand on his shoulder, a hand so big it encompassed nearly the entire shoulder with its stovelike warmth. The warmth of his father’s hand had alleviated most of his fear and somehow reassured him he was not in trouble. His mother, Gretchen, would have used her hands to smack the sense into Jim… and then later apologize for being so hot-handed.

            Jim and his father were looking at the gaping hole in the wooden wall. They could see the wind-beaten trees through it, and the clear, blue sky which had been swarming with fowl. The hole itself was big enough for an average Joe to stick their instrument in and derive pleasure from the other end, and the edges of the hole were smoldering with hot friction. Later the hole would be covered with a tiny portrait of Jim and his family.

            Had his father come because he thought Jim was shot dead? No, fifteen-and-stupid Jim doubted this. His father wouldn’t have cared whether or not his only son—an idiot one—was shot dead with a gaping star-hole through one eye. He knew with all the other conversations with his father, he would somehow leave feeling angry and ashamed at himself.

            “Sit,” his father’s deep voice broke silence, and Jim looked at the finger his father had pointed with. Jim walked over and sat on the wooden chair, which gave an ancient squeak as he leaned on the backrest.

            Jim watched in silence with his hands clutching the sides of the chair, so tight his knuckles were white. Dreadful anticipation entered him as he thought of what his punishment was going to be: ten whips? Hours and hours of chopping wood? A hammer to the pinky? He couldn’t tell by the inscrutable silence his father held between them as he picked up the Colt, sat on the family sofa, and stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

            His father’s eyes were dark brown, hair a short whiffle-cut, and complexion complicated with wrinkles. Jim had always admired his father’s strong jawline, which he had adopted himself many years later as growth took him. For a while, he had sat in the chair, silently looking at his father and waiting for him to speak. His father had taken a match, struck it against the wooden table next to him, and lit the cigarette. A huff of smoke escaped the man’s bearded mouth immediately.

            “Am I in trouble, father?” Jim finally said, unable to the bear uncomfortable silence. Sweat had broken out on his forehead in dirty beads, which ran down his face and dropped from his chin onto his lap.

            His father shook his head. “No, Jim. I feel that the time is now for the chick to leave its nest. You probably don’t know what I mean, so I’ll put it this way: you’re a man now, Jim, and I think it’s time that you learn what your father learned when he was the same age as you.”

            Jim nodded, not sure how to take the new information. _You’re a man now._ That must’ve been a lie. Sure, his voice may have deepened and he may have added an entire foot to his height, but he still felt like a kid.

            “Were you scared when I approached you?” His father said, dark eyes watching intently.

            Jim nodded, bobbing his head up and down rather violently. This man he knew as his father seemed so distant and cold. He was the object of fear in his mind.

            “Face your fears, Jim. Fight them, strangle them, and make sure they don’t live to haunt you.” His father pointed a finger at Jim, then curled his hand into a fist and made a strangling motion at the air to limn what he had said. “I don’t want my son living his entire fuckin life scared of whatever scares him. I want my son capable of controlling those fears, and I’ll show you how.”

            Edmond stood up, went to the front door of their small house and exited, gesturing Jim to follow. He had taken the gun with him as he went outside. Jim had followed shortly after, unsure of what was to happen next.

            “Son, what do you fear?”

            Jim coughed, although he wasn’t poorly. The first thing that came to his mind was _you, father_ , but he had said: “Dying, being weak, I guess.”

            And impossibly, Edmond said in a low voice: “It’s me. I’m the one you’re scared of. I know you, Jim, better than I do myself some days. I can see your eyes drop whenever they look into mine like you’re afraid to connect or behold. I can see the dampness all over your face and your shirt when you perspire like a pig. Sure, you may be afraid of death or being weak, but isn’t that something privy to all men and women?” Each thing Jim’s father had enumerated had been true. Although his father was an alcoholic on most days, abusive on others, he had a keen perceptiveness Jim always awed.

            His father stepped toward him and he did not falter. The unusually cold metal barrel of the Colt slid against the slickness of his fingers as his father urged the gun into his grip. He could feel his old man’s heavy presence shadowing over him in the form of slow and lax breaths. Breaths that cooled against his sweaty nape, but also warmed the skin at the same time like it was cooling and heating, heating and cooling.

            “Take this gun,” he said, walking in front of him, lightly brushing Jim’s shoulder as he went. “Do you know how to use it?” His hands went to the side of his hips, and his ashen lips puffed smoke.

            Jim shook his head. The gun quivered in his palms, holding it awkwardly like it was a dangerous and precious thing.

            His father came forward and helped Jim reposition the gun in his hand. The gun was held firmly in his right hand with more confidence than he had ever felt when he took his first shot. It felt like holding an instrument of death so powerful it could shake the earth itself. Jim knew it was something that could take lives, but he also felt it had more usage than taking lives. His father’s gun—an object so talismanic he couldn’t bear to hold, like the accursed hope diamond. He didn’t know how many men (or women) had fallen victim to the blast of the gun.

            Edmond stepped backward into his original position and then he said: “Take a good look at it.”

            Jim complied, although he didn’t know what to look for. There were a bunch of scratches on the trigger guard. One, two, three, four…a total of nine scratches and all of them were perfectly aligned and near the same depth. It could have only meant one thing.

            “What are these scratches?”

            His father’s eyes veiled, reminded of a dark and unwanted secret creeping its way into his mind in a series of grotesque images. “They can mean anything—the notches on a pistol. For instance, a hunter may indicate the number of times they have taken down bears or deer, or weasels, or squirrels. A gunsmith could mark the misfires of their creation… etc.” Something seemed reluctant in his voice.

            “What about yours?” Jim said. He didn’t know the gun was pointed at his father.

            “When you are older, you’ll be told. Although not by me, and only by the essence of time itself.” He puffed his cigar one last time, dropped it on the floor and stomped it into blackness. “Shoot me, Jim.”

            Jim’s eyes widened out of stupid wonder. _What? Shoot my own father?_ Immediately he realized the gun’s barrel was pointed directly at his father and he redirected it at the ground, between his faltering feet. Silently, he looked into his father’s darkened eyes, pleading for an explanation, as if to say, _what?_

            Calmly, Edmond said, “Shoot me. Go on, son. Point that thing at my head and pull the trigger. You can’t be afraid of _every_ fucking thing or else you’ll get yourself killed.” He laughed, “Another thing you said you were afraid of.”

            Jim didn’t want to. His fear of the man before him had been growing steadily until it reached a point where he didn’t even want to listen. But then another nagging voice yelled across his mind: _don’t be a wuss! Do it, chrissakes Jim!_ The voices inside his head gibbered back and forth unsteadily, one side telling him to comply and the other side rationalizing not to do it. His father had finally spoken and severed Jim’s momentary connection to the head-voices.

            “ _Shoot me!”_ And Jim snapped. Without thinking, he aimed the gun by looking through the sight scope and positioning his father’s head in between the metal spires. His index finger pulled the metal trigger, which had been doused in a coat of sweat, but the gun gave him the rejected sound of a _click, click, click_. He looked up from the sight to hear his father scream: “ _Remove the safety, dammit!”_

            Shaking, his thumb flickered the safety off and Jim aimed again, using his right eye as a vector through the rear sight and front sight, allowing the two sights to merge into one and aligning it with the image of his angry father. Through the sight, his father nodded, and in a deadpan voice, he said:

            “ _Fire!_ ”

            Jim pulled the trigger. All the strength in his fingers were drained with that single pull, the gun spazzed up and down from his nervous shaking, and he had thought, _I’ve killed him. Killed my father._ While thinking this, he had not heard the empty click of the gun, he did not feel the tiny abyss in his fingers as the metal nearly cut into his skin, he did not see the outpour of sweat dripping from the bottom of the magazine, but he did hear his father’s exuberant chuckle. The gun had been empty all along.

            “Good, Jim, good!” He ran up to Jim and clapped his back, forcing an involuntary grunt from the back of his throat. “You just killed your old man, now how do you feel?”

            “I feel…” Jim’s voice had died to a whisper and his throat felt like broken glass. He placed a hand on his father’s chest and a sturdy heartbeat thrummed against his shaky hands. _Just to make sure_. He wasn’t dreaming, was he? He didn’t really kill his father, no, but in a sense he did, he had killed the fear inside of his head somehow. The baleful glances at his father were abated and were filled with paternal comfort. Jim was alive. Edmond was alive. The gun hadn’t made boom-boom in the stale summer air, and he was actually smiling, tears running down his cheeks indistinguishable from the sweat, but still smiling. He felt _good_.

            And thirteen years later, the sound of horse hooves broke him out of his reverie. Jim could feel the shape of his father’s gun in his hands, he remembered the way it felt when he pulled the trigger, hard enough to leave a dent in the skin of his fingers for hours on end. Now, that gun had been buried with his father when he had died from alcohol poisoning, a tenth notch added to the trigger guard marking the end of its life, each notch, Jim later discovered, representing the number of lives his father had taken with the gun. The horse neighed and whinnied and skidded behind him, sending a small poof of dirt into the air. Jim turned around, it was Henry.

            Something in the rich man’s face had changed. The frown he had trademarked was spirited into a grim line, but it wasn’t grim because of sorrow, instead, it was determination. Wordlessly, the rich traveler dismounted his horse and stood in front of Jim. The sailor noticed a bundle about five feet in girth strapped to the horse. It brought a smile to his sunburnt face, a smile that cracked his chafed lips but he didn’t care. Henry was with him, Henry had a change of heart. They shook hands and Jim nodded, riding pillion on Henry’s beautiful pale horse… later he would know its name to be Miss Features.

            The stranger walked in the excessive heat despite his heavy, dark clothes and his black hat. He knew of a breathing technique that would allay most of the inner warmth he had been keeping in, like the way a dog opens its furnace mouth and lets out steam. What mattered to him was moving forward, not the sickening movement his eyes made when under the duress of powerful summer heat. His body had stopped sweating half an hour ago and dizziness had taken over him, but he was formidable enough now to read the wobbly sign that opened its arms to him:

            YANSVILLE, PG COUNTY. WELCOME TO WEARY TRAVELERS.


End file.
